Jimmy Robert (born 1975) works in a range of media—including photography, sculpture, film, video, and collaborative performance—gently breaking down divisions between two and three dimensions, image and object. Robert’s work is guided by an interest in the body and the poetic potential of ephemeral materials such as paper and tape. Creating form through gesture, he draws inspiration from artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Yoko Ono. His exploration of moving bodies, crumpling paper, and repetitive gestures, in works that feature actions such as a hand tearing tape from skin or fingers rubbing a text, has come to define him as an artist of touching.

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“These images document places where I did for example a bit of research towards the theater of the oppressed and its remnants in Rio and in particular in this psychiatric institute in Jurujuba as well as an exhibition of Art Brut following the legacy of Doctor Nise da silveira at the Instituto Moreira salles where by chance I discovered the work Ana Cristina Cesar.

There is also a still of the performance I did at the teatro Ipanema with the group of artists/community around Capacete at the time. Finally, a production still of the video installation Vanishing point showed at the 8th Berlin Biennial where I filmed on super 8 the amazing drag performer Erika Vogue doing a dazzling performance of Bate cabelo throughout the modernist edificio Capanema. We also went to Ilha Grange as a group which was a simply unforgettable moment, here you see Helmut with a Penguin which had somehow lost its way to the south.”

Sasha Huber is a visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage, born in Zurich (Switzerland) in 1975. She lives and works in Helsinki (Finland). Huber’s work is primarily concerned with the politics of memory and belonging, particularly in relation to colonial residue left in the environment. Sensitive to the subtle threads connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses video, photography, collaborations with researchers, and performance-based interventions. She has also discovered the compressed-air staple gun as a tool capable of producing visually arresting works that also functions like a symbolic weapon, offering the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics.

Born in Marseille in 1971. He works and lives in Paris. He is represented by the gallery Jousse Entreprise.

Louidgi Beltrame’s work is based on documenting modes of human organisation throughout the history of the 20th century. He travels to sites defined by a paradigmatic relation to modernity: Hiroshima, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Chandigarh, Tchernobyl or the mining colony of Gunkanjima, over the sea off Nagasaki. His films – based on the recording of reality and the constitution of an archive – appeal to fiction as a possible way to consider History.

“Paraíso Ocupado is a reconstruction of a failed modernist plan for an urban center located in the West zone of Rio de Janeiro. This plan, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, was officially approved in 1970 and served as inspiration for Lúcio Costa’s Pilot Plan for the greater region. All the documents in the exhibition are part of an abandoned archive found in the ruin of one of the three actually constructed circular towers. A website with the digitalized documents was launched with the exhibition, so the material became accessible to the public. This precedes the ultimate objective of Paraíso Ocupado: the establishment of a museum concerned with the urbanization history of Barra da Tijuca.”

“I founded ‘de Vluchtmaat’ 3 years ago. I recently started coordinating the programming at the Vluchtmaat. De Vluchtmaat offers a temporary home to 40 refugees in limbo and rents out workingspaces to artists, designers, non-profit organizations and small entrepeneurs. The rent they pay covers all monthly fixed costs like gas, water and electricity. So, we created a shelter for 40 people, that otherwise would be on the street, that doesn’t cost anything to neither the owner of the building or the municipality. Besides de Vluchtmaat functions as a cultural hub in which collaborations between renters and residents are happening. http://vluchtmaat.nl/

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Next to that I recently restarted my individual artistic practice again after leaving ‘Here to Support’. Here to Support is a non-profit organization I founded in 2013. Here to Support engages in projects initiated by a group of artists and theorists in close cooperation with refugees in limbo. Together they aim to shape partnerships based on equality within a society characterized by fundamental inequalities. Here to Support does not focus on providing humanitarian assistance, but it strives for emancipation of undocumented migrants. To make them seen, heard and essentially, to put them in charge of their own lives again. Here to Support initiates educational and cultural projects that enable refugees in limbo to express and develop themselves. http://heretosupport.nl/ Two times I have been at Capacete for a residency period to do research and produce work. This was in 2010 and 2012. Later on I visited Capacete again because I fell in love with Rio de Janeiro and with Johnson Beauge, to whom I am now married. My stay in Rio was life changing in so many aspects, that I don’t even know where to start. It was magical but painful, relaxed but intense, inspiring but hard to get things done. It was it all. A place to go back to. Again and again.”

“If there has ever been a possibility to turn back time, this would be a suited moment to do so. However much things would probably turnout to be the same, I would have known things in advance, provided in turning back time, I could remember the future. That’s how I look at it now, I mean, from where I can see things at this point, today. Then, mid-day early July 2006, I found myself surrounded by as much endless future as overwhelming depths of the past. We, Helmut and I, were on our way to one of Peru’s highest mountain peeks of the Andes. Driving our ragged rented car with caution over an endlessly winding and unpaved mountain trail we arrived at a valley so vast and boundless, that my first thought was how we had crossed the ages to enter a pre-historic landscape. And then and there, as I envisioned myself having traveled back trough a loophole in time, soon to be surrounded by long lost wildlife and luscious vegetation, both my past and future flashed by. At the time a substantial part of my fortunate and solid world had started to show cracks and crumbles. In April I had moved back from New York to support my mother in her life’s struggle against lung cancer, only to join Helmut on his journey trough Peru in June and July. It had been my mother’s whish and joy for me to continue my adventures life as much as possible. And at every village or city on the course of our voyage, I rushed into an internet café and wrote home an exhilarated travelers report. It was as if I could share my journey to one of the highest peeks of the world; as if I could bring my mother to where time had stood still and where the air was so pure that it could cleanse all disease. And trough the contact we kept during my travels, it became clear that my latest expedition had in a way become as thrilling to her as it was to me.

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Some month before my mothers left lung had been cut out and although this had been a severely traumatic experience, for the time being, she was freed from her illness and on the road to recovery. I was rather optimistic about her survival chances and imagined a future where my mother, her husband and I would travel together and savor such overwhelmingly beautiful nature as that valley surrounding me in Peru.

We stopped the car at the entrance of a cave covered in pre-historic paintings. Stepping out of the car I was overcome by dizziness and the extensive violence of the nature that surrounded me danced before my eyes. Maybe I suffered from some light version of altitude disease and possibly the oscillating travel had exhausted me, what I could feel as the world twisted before my eyes, was a deep confidence and optimism. Then and there everything, next week, next moth, next year, my entire future would be magnificent and all right. Hemlut and I walked around marveling at the valley beneath us, and the mountaintops above. I thought about how I could enjoy being back in Brussels, how I would witness my mother’s recovery and how I would travel to Asia for the first time. Later that day we reached the mountain top at over 5000 meters (3 miles) height. The air at the top was so thin that we could hardly breath or speak. I peered into the distance, imagined that distance to be the depth of time and was sure that in the future we could all live forever.”

P E R U . I M P R O V

“Capactete’s ROAD lead to my doorstep and an invitation to work and travel a stretch alongside the Pan-American highway was offered and excepted. The journey would lead from Lima (Peru) to Quito (Equator). People asked “what will you do?”. My reply was, that I had been doing several things the past years and that, most likely, I would do one or a few of those things there. However, slowly a concept of what could happen started to take shape.

When one thinks of a road-movie, the principle is that between start and finish of a journey a story unfolds. This is a lineal narrative. A story that is told on different levels in time and location is a parallel narrative. I envisioned a road movie constructed as a parallel narrative. Instead of events occurring after each other as the road is traveled, it would seem to all happen at once. With this idea and allot of confidence in Helmut Batista’s and my own ability to connect to people and improvise, I left for Peru via Rio de Janeiro.

In Lima both Helmut and I were invited to lecture at ‘La Culpable’ – an artist run space. There we met with several local artist and curators, some of which could advise us on where to go and what to see. Soon after, we left Lima for the Andes Mountains. I felt like a pioneer, traveling on intuition and opportunity. And while driving through the impressive nature we made regular stops to shoot a scene or sequence. The idea to create a parallel movie has never left the project, however confronted with the reality of our travels and in order to work daily in un-predictable conditions, the rules of the concept were loosened to fit the actuality.

What had occurred to me during the first days of the travel is that if I was going to work with locals and mostly on an instant basis, I should work with a modus that enabled me to stop the car, mount the camera and start shooting. This principle seems simple and easy, but in order to avoid rather digested exotica and/or tourist snapshots, I needed to challenge the images I was making at all time. This led to a series of improvised scenes – shot during the entire journey trough Peru – where at first I would objectively document a scene or location. As such I documented what was going on ‘for real’; nothing was orchestrated, choreographed or interfered with. The second phase was to engage the documented image – the people and location – and change the objective document into a highly subjective document. As such a ‘natural’ scene had become ‘artificial’. A play between reality and fiction was constructed carefully.

After returning to Lima from the Andes, we traveled to the city of Iquitos in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Colombian/Spanish artist Raimond Chaves joined us together with Peruvian artist Gilda Mantilla who were both researching works the 2006 Sao Paulo biennale had commissioned them to produce. By car and mostly by boat, the four of us traveled trough the rainforest and over the Amazon river, all the while setting up and filming scenes. After a few days stopover in Iquitos we returned to Lima and got on the road to Quito in Equator. In Equator we did not have the opportunity to continue to work, but were invited to lecture at the Catholic university of Quito.

All in the entire ROAD journey/project took us trough deserts, over mountains, past the Pacific Ocean, cross the jungle and finally up to the capital of Equator. All the while scenes for the project were shot, alongside photos and other video documents that were stimulated on the spot. At this moment most of the digital material is ripening in some a hard disk. In the near future, with a nice blend of time, a scent of post-production and a touch of drama, the works will be served. Seriously though, the ROAD project was hugely productive and inspiring, leaving me with allot of fruits to be plucked and appropriated in some way. For the moment this feels like a luxury problem, since many of the scenes shot have worked out really well and there is much potential for several works or directions to venture into. Time will tell if the final work will be a parallel edit of a lineal experience or a selection of improvised scenes, narrating small adventures…”

“In 1979, when he was thirty-nine, Jim Lewis decided to try to find his identical twin brother, from whom he was separated at birth. Six weeks later, Jim Lewis knocked on the door of Jim Springer. The moment they shook hands, they felt close as if they had known each other their whole lives. Not only that, they also learned about an amazing series of coin- cidences in their twindom. To begin with they realized they both were named Jim by their adoptive parents. Both had grown up with adoptive brothers called Larry. Both had married girls named Linda, divorced them and then both married girls named Betty. Both had named their sons James Allan. Both had owned a dog named Toy. Both chain smoked the same make of cigarette. The twins were fascinated, not only in these similarities in experience but by their mental similarities—one would start to say something and the other would finish it.”